The Martin Duberman Reader (4 page)

Although Black Power makes good sense when defined to mean further organization and cooperation within the Negro community, the results that are likely to follow in terms of political leverage can easily be exaggerated. The impact is likely to be greatest at the county level in the Deep South and in the urban ghettos of the North. In this regard, the Black Panther Party of Lowndes County, Alabama, is the prototype.

There are roughly twelve thousand Negroes in Lowndes County and three thousand whites, but until 1964 there was not a single Negro registered to vote while white registration had reached 118 percent of those eligible. Negro life in Lowndes, as Andrew Kopkind has graphically recounted, was—and is—wretched. The median family income for whites is $4,400, for Negroes, $935; Negro farmhands earn three to six dollars a day; half of the Negro women who work are maids in Montgomery (which requires a forty- to sixty-mile daily round-trip) at four dollars a day; few Negroes have farms, since 90 percent of the land is owned by about eighty-five white families; the one large industrial plant in the area, the new Dan River Mills textile factory, will employ Negroes only in menial capacities; most Lowndes Negroes are functional illiterates, living in squalor and hopelessness.

The Black Panther Party set out to change all this. The only path to change in Lowndes, and in much of the Deep South, is to take over the courthouse, the seat of local power. For generations the courthouse in Lowndes has been controlled by the Democratic Party; indeed, there is no Republican Party in the county. Obviously it made little sense for SNCC organizers to hope to influence the local Democrats; no white moderates existed and no discussion of integration was tolerated. To have expected blacks to “bore from within” would have been, as Carmichael has said, “like asking the Jews to reform the Nazi party.”

Instead, Carmichael and his associates established the separate
Black Panther Party. After months of work SNCC organizers (with almost no assistance from federal agents) registered enough Negroes to hope for a numerical majority in the county. But in the election of November 1966, the Black Panther Party was defeated for a variety of reasons that include Negro apathy or fear and white intimidation. Despite this defeat, the possibility of a better life for Lowndes County Negroes does at last exist, and should the Black Panther Party come into power at some future point, that possibility could become a reality.

Nonetheless, even on the local level and even in the Deep South, Lowndes County is not representative. In Alabama, for example, only eleven of the state's sixty-seven counties have black majorities. Where these majorities do not exist, the only effect independent black political parties are likely to have is to consolidate the whites in opposition. Moreover, and more significant, many of the basic ills from which Negro Americans suffer—inadequate housing, inferior education, limited job opportunities—are national phenomena requiring national resources to solve. Whether these resources will be allocated in sufficient amounts will depend, in turn, on whether a national coalition can be formed to exert pressure on the federal government—a coalition of civil rights activists, church groups, campus radicals, New Class technocrats, unskilled, un-unionized laborers, and certain elements in organized labor, such as the United Auto Workers or the United Federation of Teachers. Such a coalition, of course, would necessitate Negro-white unity, a unity Black Power at least temporarily rejects.

The answer that Black Power advocates give to the coalition argument is of several pieces. The only kind of progressive coalition that can exist in this country, they say, is the mild, liberal variety that produced the civil rights legislation of recent years. And that kind of legislation has proven itself grossly inadequate. Its chief result has been to lull white liberals into believing that the major battles have been won, whereas in fact there has been almost no change, or even change for the worse, in the daily lives of most blacks.

Unemployment among Negroes has actually gone up in the past ten years. Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, with its promising provision for the withdrawal of federal funds in cases of discrimination, has been used in limited fashion in regard to the schools but not at all in regard to other forms of unequal treatment, such as segregated hospital facilities. Under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, only about forty federal registrars have been sent into the South, though many areas have less than the 50 percent registration figure that would legally warrant intervention. In short, the legislation produced by the liberal coalition of the early sixties has turned out to be little more than federally approved tokenism, a continuation of paper promises and ancient inequities.

If a radical coalition could be formed in this country—that is, one willing to scrutinize in depth the failings of our system; to suggest structural, not piecemeal, reforms; to see them executed with sustained rather than intermittent vigor—then Black Power advocates might feel less need to separate themselves and to concentrate on local, marginal successes. But no responsible observer believes that in the foreseeable future a radical coalition on the Left can become the effective political majority in the United States; we will be fortunate if a radical coalition on the Right does not. And so to SNCC and CORE, talk of further cooperation with white liberals is only an invitation to further futility. It is better, they feel, to concentrate on encouraging Negroes everywhere to self-respect and self-help, and in certain local areas, where their numbers warrant it, to try to win actual political power.

As an adaptation to present realities, Black Power thus has a persuasive logic. But there is such a thing as being too present-minded; by concentrating on immediate prospects, the new doctrine may be jeopardizing larger possibilities for the future, those that could result from a national coalition with white allies. Though SNCC and CORE insist that they are not trying to cut whites out of the movement, that they merely want to redirect white energies into organizing whites so that at some future point a truly meaningful coalition of Negroes and whites can take place, there are grounds
for doubting whether they really are interested in a future reconciliation, or if they are, whether some of the overtones of their present stance will allow for it. For example, SNCC's so-called “position paper” on Black Power attacks white radicals as well as white liberals, speaks vaguely of differing white and black “psyches,” and seems to find all contact with all whites contaminating or intimidating. (“Whites are the ones who must try to raise themselves to our humanistic level.”)

SNCC's bitterness at the hypocrisy and evasion of the white majority is understandable, yet the refusal to discriminate between degrees of inequity, the penchant instead for wholesale condemnation of all whites, is as unjust as it is self-defeating. The indictments and innuendos of SNCC's position paper give some credence to the view that the line between Black Power and black racism is a fine one easily erased, that, as always, means and ends tend to get confused, that a tactic of racial solidarity can turn into a goal of racial purity.

The philosophy of Black Power is thus a blend of varied, in part contending, elements, and it cannot be predicted with any certainty which will assume dominance. But a comparison between the Black Power movement and the personnel, programs, and fates of earlier radical movements in this country can make some contribution toward understanding its dilemmas and its likely directions.

Any argument based on historical analogy can, of course, become oversimplified and irresponsible. Historical events do not repeat themselves with anything like regularity; every event is to a large degree embedded in its own special context. An additional danger in reasoning from historical analogy is that in the process we'll limit rather than expand our options; by arguing that certain consequences seem always to follow from certain actions and that therefore only a set number of alternatives ever exist, we can prevent ourselves from seeing new possibilities or from utilizing old ones in creative ways. We must be careful when attempting to predict the future from the past that in the process we don't straitjacket the present. Bearing these cautions and limitations in mind, some
insight can still be gained from a historical perspective. For if there are large variances through time between roughly analogous events, there are also some similarities, and it is these that make comparative study possible and profitable. In regard to Black Power, I think we gain particular insight by comparing it with the two earlier radical movements of abolitionism and anarchism.

Because they called for an immediate end to slavery everywhere in the United States, the abolitionists represented the left wing of the antislavery movement (a position comparable to the one SNCC and CORE occupy today in the civil rights movement). Most Northerners who disapproved of slavery weren't willing to go as far or as fast as the abolitionists, preferring instead a more ameliorative approach. The tactic that increasingly won the approval of the Northern majority was the doctrine of nonextension: no further expansion of slavery would be allowed, but the institution would be left alone where it already existed. The principle of nonextension first came into prominence in the late 1840s when fear developed in the North that territory acquired from our war with Mexico would be made into new slave states. Later the doctrine formed the basis of the Republican Party, which in 1860 elected Lincoln to the presidency. The abolitionists, in other words, with their demand for immediate (and uncompensated) emancipation, never became the major channel of Northern antislavery sentiment. They always remained a small sect, vilified by slavery's defenders and distrusted even by allies within the antislavery movement.

The parallels between the abolitionists and the current defenders of Black Power seem to me numerous and striking. It's worth noting, first of all, that neither group started off with so-called “extremist” positions (the appropriateness of that word being, in any case, dubious). The SNCC of 1967 is not the SNCC formed in 1960; both its personnel and its programs have shifted markedly. SNCC originally grew out of the sit-ins spontaneously begun in Greensboro, North Carolina, by four freshmen at the all-Negro North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College. The sit-in technique spread rapidly through the South, and within a few months SNCC
was formally inaugurated to channel and encourage further activities. At its inception, SNCC's staff was interracial, religious in orientation, committed to the American Dream, chiefly concerned with winning the right to share more equitably in that dream, and optimistic about the possibility of being allowed to do so. SNCC placed its hopes on an appeal to the national conscience, and this it expected to arouse by the examples of nonviolence and redemptive love, and by the dramatic devices of sit-ins, freedom rides, and protest marches.

The abolitionist movement, at the time of its inception, was similarly benign and sanguine. It, too, placed emphasis on moral suasion, believing that the first order of business was to bring the iniquity of slavery to the country's attention, to arouse the average American's conscience. Once this was done, the abolitionists felt, discussion then could, and would, begin on the particular ways and means best calculated to bring about rapid, orderly emancipation. Some of those abolitionists who later became intransigent defenders of immediatism—including William Lloyd Garrison—were willing, early in their careers, to consider plans for preliminary apprenticeship. They were willing, in other words, to settle for gradual emancipation immediately begun instead of demanding that freedom itself be instantly achieved.

But this early flexibility received little encouragement. Neither the appeal to conscience nor the willingness to engage in debate over means brought results. In the North, the abolitionists encountered massive apathy; in the South, massive resistance. Thus thwarted, and influenced as well by the discouraging British experiment with gradualism in the West Indies, the abolitionists abandoned their earlier willingness to consider a variety of plans for prior education and training, and shifted to the position that emancipation had to take place at once and without compensation to the slaveholder. They also began (especially in New England) to advocate such doctrines as Dis-Union and No-Government, positions that directly parallel Black Power's recent advocacy of separation
and decentralization, and that, then as now, produced discord and division within the movement, anger and denunciation without.

But the parallel of paramount importance I want to draw between the two movements is their similar passage from moderation to extremism. In both cases, there was a passage, a shift in attitude and program, and it's essential that this be recognized, for it demonstrates the developmental nature of these movements for social change. Or, to reduce the point to individuals (and to clichés): “Revolutionaries are not born but made.” Garrison did not start his career with the doctrine of immediatism; as a young man, he even had kind words for the American Colonization Society, a group devoted to deporting Negroes to Africa and Central America. And Stokely Carmichael did not begin his ideological voyage with the slogan of Black Power; as a teenager he was opposed to student sit-ins in the South. What makes a man shift from reform to revolution is, it seems to me, primarily to be explained by the intransigence or indifference of his society: either society refuses reforms or gives them in the form of tokens. Thus, if one views the Garrisons and Carmichaels as extremists, one should at least place the blame for that extremism where it belongs—not on their individual temperaments, their genetic predispositions, but on a society that scorned or toyed with their initial pleas for justice.